Forza Motorsport is gone, after huge layoffs from Microsoft

Layoffs, cancellations, closings, redundancies… it’s the trend that won’t go away! Initially, there were rumblings of layoffs affecting Microsoft-owned game studios, and now it’s here. The affected studios included King and Zenimax, including the cancellation of Everwild and Perfect Dark, titles announced in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

Joining the list of cancellations is Forza Motorsport, reported by Eurogramer. At the time, we only knew that the layoffs affected 10 Studios, the studio behind Motorsport. But now we know that they’ve axed an entire game series in the process. The announcement comes from Fred Russell, a (now) former content coordinator for the studio. Russell posted on Facebook that the layoffs include the team behind Motorsport.

However, he has noted that the Horizon series will “continue at this point“, and the “studio is open to support the Horizon side“. Russell has reiterated in comments that only the Motorsport team is gone. In the Eurogamer article, there isn’t any clear sign of how many aren’t with the studio. Whereas, 10% of employees who worked at King (roughly 200 employees) are included in the layoffs. 10 Studios’ former content creator, John Schommer, replied to Russell’s post, stating that he’s “very thankful for the 10 years I was able to be a face and voice for this brand and its awesome car loving community“.

This is a shame to see so many layoffs, especially when it comes to the racing sim genre. There are not a lot of new games made in the space, and the ones that do come out are often lacklustre or divide the community. Like 2022’s Gran Turismo 7, where if you wanted a specific car, you could either spend hours of your time grinding for game credits due to the scarcity of them, or spend $29.95AUD on 2,000,000 credits to buy a hi-spec car. Thus, losing another racing sim game to layoffs in this already tiny genre sucks. Especially for fans of the series.

It’s great that 10 Studio will now help out the Horizon series, the studio behind that, Playground Games, is working on the Fable reboot announced last year. The release year for the reboot is for 2025, but as of February of this year, it’s delayed until 2026. It might be a while till we see another Horizon title… on the horizon. What do you think about all of this? Were you keen for another Motorsport game, or is it good riddance? Let us know!